A visit to the Burrell Collection, Glasgow

 

Glasgow certainly needs trophy buildings. After the glories of the late 19th and early 20th century, when the University and commercial centre competed to create the most dramatic and ostentatious constructions, the next seventy-five years seemed to produce much less of note. When Glasgow finally found a home for The Burrell Collection, ignoring Burrell’s stipulation that it should be housed many miles from Glasgow because of the polluted city air, they did the right thing and selected by competition a very grand building, not lacking at all in self-confidence. The architects were Barry Gasson, John Meunier, and Brit Andresen, who seem to have a remarkably low profile - I haven’t heard of any other notable buildings by them. The project was an architect’s dream. It was one of those rare opportunities that architects have a huge budget and a brief to create something without reference to any surrounding buildings. The Burrell Collection sits by itself, next to a wood on one side and parkland the other, and the architect was able to do something very dramatic. He chose a gorgeous pink stone, which reminds me of Philip Johnson’s choice of stone for the Bielefeld Art Gallery in Germany. 

The building was completed in 1983, and extended and refurbished in 2022. It’s astonishing that a year later, the building looks entirely new, with next to no sign of wear, and no indication of what was added or changed in the refurbishment. What struck me when walking around the museum were the vistas, with stunning corridors in two directions, and a lovely wood close to the galleries. 

At the time, the spaces were so breath-taking that the collection almost took a back seat. Thinking about it a couple of weeks later, that impression seems more and more a summary of my visit: I think the building was the most impressive experience from the museum. Trying to make sense of Burrell’s collecting policy escapes me. After a while walking from room to room, the amassing of objects with seemingly little coherence becomes tiring. Yet the building seems to exert a powerful effect on the visitor; it made me more contemplative, the chairs looked inviting, and the space seemed somehow special. 

We visited on a summer Sunday, when the museum, park and café were full. Clearly, this was a popular outing for people in Glasgow. In response, the museum staff had certainly worked hard to try to make the collection accessible. So hard, in fact, that the usual principles of museums had been forgotten. To be specific, some of the objects lacked a caption. You could buy a guide at the desk, but that wouldn’t necessarily tell you what you were looking at. For me, it is a basic and necessary part of the museum experience to label what you are looking at (unless there is good reason not to). 

The rooms with partial captions were the very rooms that attempted to recreate the Burrell’s living spaces. But these rooms didn’t for me recreate the Burrell home. They were too close to being a gallery – and yet, at the same time, incompletely captioned. Items out of context. From contemporary photographs, it looks like Burrell and his wife were surrounded by artefacts of different periods and styles. Here, for example, is an angel with organ:

According to the caption, “Burrell displayed this angel, one of a pair, in his grand dining room”. I couldn’t imagine anything more awkward to explain to visitors for dinner. At least the Pierre Loti house in  Rochefort is so crazily inauthentic that the tastelessness becomes interesting. Burrell, in contrast, gives me the impression of a collector’s dead hand, removing the context and hence the ideas and thinking behind the objects when they were created, and leaving them in a collection that resembles in many respects a junk shop.   

When we read the captions that were present, they were frequently dreadful. One reason is simply Burrell’s eclecticsm (to put it as politely as I can)> Burrell appears to have been a typical 19th-century collector for whom the amassing of objects was perhaps more importance than understanding their context. No attempt has been made to add that context, so the result is that many objects look torn from their surroundings in the crassest way. Here is a fragment of a Roman mosaic:

The caption simply states when Burrell bought it (1954), and that it was made in Italy. Such an object is a curator’s nightmare. Are there other depictions of animals in Roman mosaics? Are there any comparable pieces in other collections? We don’t know. Even with this comparatively late addition to the collection, many years have passed since the bequest, and the museum staff should have had time to say something meaningful about the objects. Too many captions reveal a lack of attribution: “possibly France”, for example.

Here is an example, a door. What does the caption tell us?

 

Portal

About 1175-1200

Probably made in Northern England or Scotland

This grand doorway was probably once part of the entrance to an important building. The are lots of different types of fancy carving on the stonework.

 

Is that all that can be said about this door? The surrounding objects have no connection with the door. Most visitors will probably barely notice they are walking through a wonderful piece of carving. Yet such a notable door must have a provenance, and could be tracked down. To say it was “probably” part of an important building is ludicrous. Any building with a door like this would be important.

 

Dreary political correctness

I could give many examples of crass captioning. Many of them are an attempt by the museum staff to drag the collections into some kind of topical relevance. This attempt sometimes fails woefully as the images seem frequently at odds with the kind of impression the staff want to give the visitors.

 

Let’s face it, a sculpture celebrating the vocation of a nun, and created after the Reformation, is rather challenging to present to a 21st-century family audience. Here is the museum’s attempt: 

St Walburga of Eichstätt with nuns

about 1600-25

As nuns, we spend our days in prayer and helping those in need. Joining our home, the convent can also bring new opportunities not often given to other women. You can learn to read, write and help the sick. You could become a respected abbess – looking after your fellow nuns and running the convent.

Well, the sculpture to me looks like a conventional image of collective piety. Piety may not be very fashionable today, but that is what the work of art celebrates. It doesn’t excite me very much, but I can’t ignore the theme. I might mention the colouring, and the lively gestures of the remaining limbs, which gives the piece a memorable animation. I hadn’t thought to examine becoming an abbess as a career choice for the medieval woman.

In fact, the caption tries its best to ignore what the piece is about. Where do I start with this caption? Are the nuns “we” or “you”? How can a convent join a home (“Joining our home, the convent can bring opportunities”)? St Walburga, or Walpurga, according to Wikipedia, is famous as one of the earliest women authors  - she wrote the life of her brother, something not mentioned here. But she also spent 26 years in a convent in Wimborne, most probably making lace – not, perhaps, the female vocation the museum staff would want to promote.

To be fair to Burrell, he did collect some work by contemporaries. But for every locally produced work, there seem to be several miscellaneous items from the ragbag of art history. Even when he selects a contemporary work, I’m not always convinced by his taste. For example, I learn that A Mallard Rising (1908) was one of his favourite paintings. Although he failed to buy it, the Burrell Trustees finally acquired it in 2022. It might be a nice gesture to Mr Burrell, but it’s a lousy painting. There seems to be a collective attempt by the museum not to question the founder’s taste. Even the descriptions of the servants, in the recreated living room, describe an unlikely utopia where everyone, servants and masters, lived in peaceful harmony.

So that’s my reading of the Burrell Collection. It might seem outrageous to condemn the collection, but I don’t feel the way it is presented has done it any favours. The best exhibit is the building itself; after all, it’s the only item in the collection that doesn’t feel as though it has been torn from its context and lost its meaning. The building itself is fulfilling its original function, to inspire and  excite the visitor, and it achieves that magnificently. It is one of those buildings where you walk around viewing vista after vista, leaving you with a heightened appetite for fine visual experiences.

To be honest, this view would look better without that old door in the way